• Telekom experts to monitor the hospital’s IT and OT 24 hours a day in future
• AI supports the search for anomalies and helps keep the situation picture up to date
• New milestone in the “Innovative Secure Medical Campus” lighthouse project

The KI.NRW lighthouse project “Innovative Secure Medical Campus UKB” (ISMC) has reached the finish line. Together, a holistic and secure ecosystem has been created that shows ways for the future of digital medicine using the example of an extremely versatile university hospital. Final milestone: Over the next three years, the watchful eyes and sensitive sensor technology of Deutsche Telekom Security GmbH will help secure the digital attack surface of Bonn University Hospital (UKB). The company has put together a cyber security package to meet the needs of the total of 38 clinics and 31 institutes that are part of the UKB.

“As a digitalisation pioneer, the UKB has always paid the utmost attention to cyber security and made it a topic of discussion.

Most recently at the joint symposium – Networked with Security – with the Federal Office for Information Security, the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices and the Federal Minister of Health,” explains Prof. Wolfgang Holzgreve, Chairman of the Board and Medical Director of the UKB.

Dieter Padberg, IT Director of the UKB, is happy about the support: “Digitalisation in medicine is becoming increasingly important. On the other hand, the cyber security situation has become extremely complex. That’s why we are pleased to have gained such a competent partner in the fields of data protection and cyber security in Telekom.”

UKB is the first customer in this area of the health sector in Germany to be introduced by Telekom. Others will follow in the course of the year. In the past 24 months, the effects of unfortunately successful ransomware attacks have also brought hospitals into the media spotlight. Now exemplary digitisation projects like this one show a different picture.

Flexible package grows with the challenges

The cyber-security package offers hospitals defensive measures that have so far been familiar to large corporations. It is modular and therefore adaptable, and the building blocks include the Magenta Security Shield. This service protects users, data as well as IT and secures the most popular gateways for hackers.

This includes endpoints such as servers and workstations, e-mail, networks and access to the internet. But ten times larger, roughly speaking, is the operational technology (OT) in hospitals – from computer tomographs to smart beds. So medical devices and their communication with each other will also be protected.

In future, the security systems will be monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by several hundred cyber security specialists from Telekom in several shifts. They will detect suspicious behaviour at an early stage and initiate countermeasures. Artificial intelligence is also used here, which checks anomalies in advance, compares them with already known patterns and can classify them.

A head start from many years of experience

The Telekom Security teams know all aspects of current threats at close quarters. Whether from a defence perspective, in order to prevent overload attacks on IT systems from taking effect in the first place. Or from the perspective of the first responders of the Incident Response Team, who help victims of cyber attacks every day. Each time, they also gain industry or system-specific insights that improve defence strategies. Active research by Cyber Threat Intelligence on actors and their actions also contributes to this.

This 360-degree view creates an overall advantage for the customer that cannot be taken for granted on the market. “The broad field of OT security in particular is coming more into the focus of criminal groups in the course of networking. They know that the front door is being better and better guarded, and they try it elsewhere. In the hospital environment, they encounter a heterogeneous landscape of different systems. Keeping an eye on both IT and OT is the key to more security,” says Thomas Tschersich, CEO of Deutsche Telekom Security GmbH.

Part of the Innovative Secure Medical Campus (ISMC) project

The cyber security component completes the concept of the Innovative Secure Medical Campus. This lighthouse project, unique in Germany, was developed and advanced by the UKB together with partners under the leadership of Prof. Ulrike Attenberger, Director of the Clinic for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, and Dieter Padberg. These include the Cyber Security Cluster Bonn e.V. and subsidiaries of Deutsche Telekom AG. “With the first 5G campus network for a university hospital, the AI strategy and now the integrated security concept, there is a lot of pioneering work for the healthcare sector in Germany in this showcase project.

This will be very valuable as a blueprint for the development of other university hospitals,” praises Gottfried Ludewig, Head of Health at T-Systems. This concept is worth 17.5 million euros in funding from the Ministry for Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalisation and Energy of the state of NRW.

About Bonn University Hospital

About 500,000 patients are cared for in the UKB every year. It employs about 9,000 people and has a balance sheet total of 1.6 billion euros. In addition to the more than 3,300 medical and dental students, another 585 trainees in numerous health professions come to the UKB every year. It is ranked first among university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia in the science ranking and in the Focus clinic list and has the third-highest case mix index (severity of cases) in Germany. The F.A.Z. Institute has named the UKB Germany’s most sought-after employer and training champion among public hospitals nationwide in 2022 and 2023.

Visit the Telekom at Digital X 2023 Digital X is coming back to Cologne on 20 and 21 September 2023. With stages, marketplaces, brandhouses and top-class speakers, Cologne city centre will once again become a world exhibition of digitalisation in 2023. Megatrends of the future and digital solutions can be experienced – in the areas of the future of work, connected business, security and sustainability. Digital X is Europe’s largest cross-industry digitisation initiative. Organised by Deutsche Telekom, it involves over 300 national and international partners. You can find more details at www.telekom.com/digitalx.

https://geschaeftskunden.telekom.de/digitale-loesungen/cyber-security/security-for-healthcare